From 4dd59a40c8a8fed3008082da45e29c1c188b7fe8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Peter Stone <thepeterstone@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2026 23:47:13 +0000
Subject: Play the YouTube embed with a referrer instead of in an iframe

Peter, on the previous build: "the inline player now plays the audio but
the video is a black screen." So Error 153 is gone and the stream is
decoding -- what is left is a display problem.

The iframe was not needed in the first place. A `Referer` header alone
satisfies the embed, which means the player can be the WebView's own
ordinary top-level document again. That drops two constructs the last
build added: a `loadDataWithBaseURL` page, whose origin is synthetic,
and a cross-origin subframe inside it. Both have a history of rendering
video oddly in WebView, and the black screen appeared with them.

Measured on an Android user agent -- no referrer: Error 153; `&origin=`
in the query: Error 153; inside an iframe: plays; with a `Referer`
header: plays. The referrer is a constant on a reserved `.invalid`
domain rather than the article's URL, so YouTube learns which app asked
and nothing about what is being read -- the same reason the nocookie
domain is used.

Confirmed in the app's own WebView: the embed loads with no error,
854x480, readyState 4, playing.

NOT confirmed: that a picture now reaches the screen. This emulator
cannot render video in a WebView at all -- it hard-crashed the AVD
twice, including on a plain <video> in an ordinary non-dialog WebView --
so the one thing that matters here can only be checked on real
hardware.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018AwnALZL6bD4VBtATDVv3B
---
 .../main/java/org/terst/feedreader/ui/ReaderWebView.kt   | 16 +++++-----------
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-)

(limited to 'app/src/main/java/org/terst/feedreader/ui/ReaderWebView.kt')

diff --git a/app/src/main/java/org/terst/feedreader/ui/ReaderWebView.kt b/app/src/main/java/org/terst/feedreader/ui/ReaderWebView.kt
index 78020a9..1bc1315 100644
--- a/app/src/main/java/org/terst/feedreader/ui/ReaderWebView.kt
+++ b/app/src/main/java/org/terst/feedreader/ui/ReaderWebView.kt
@@ -398,17 +398,11 @@ fun YouTubePlayerDialog(videoId: String, onDismiss: () -> Unit) {
                         }
                     }
                     webChromeClient = WebChromeClient()
-                    // A host page with the embed in an iframe, not the embed itself as the
-                    // top-level document. YouTube answers a top-level embed with "Video player
-                    // configuration error -- Error 153", which is the reported "YouTube play is
-                    // misconfigured"; framed, the same URL plays. See YouTubeLinks.
-                    loadDataWithBaseURL(
-                        YOUTUBE_EMBED_BASE_URL,
-                        youTubeEmbedPageHtml(videoId),
-                        "text/html",
-                        "utf-8",
-                        null
-                    )
+                    // The embed as this WebView's own ordinary document, with a Referer
+                    // header. Without one YouTube answers "Video player configuration error --
+                    // Error 153", the reported "YouTube play is misconfigured". See
+                    // YouTubeLinks for the alternatives measured and why this one won.
+                    loadUrl(youTubeEmbedUrl(videoId), mapOf("Referer" to YOUTUBE_EMBED_REFERRER))
                 }
             },
             onRelease = { it.destroy() }
-- 
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